Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 32 | Spring 1999 Jewish identity and otherness in the modern short story Immigrant Jewish identity and the female voice: Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley Carole Stone Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/171 ISSN : 1969-6108 Éditeur Presses universitaires de Rennes Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 mars 1999 ISSN : 0294-04442 Référence électronique Carole Stone, « Immigrant Jewish identity and the female voice: Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley », Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 32 | Spring 1999, mis en ligne le 10 juillet 2008, consulté le 03 décembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/171 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 3 décembre 2020. © All rights reserved Immigrant Jewish identity and the female voice: Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley 1 Immigrant Jewish identity and the female voice: Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley Carole Stone 1 In this essay I will show how Yezierska's Eastern European immigrant voice, with its Yiddish women's component, forges a new American identity while maintaining a Jewish identity. I will demonstrate further that voice is the legacy she leaves to the next generation of Jewish-American female writers, exemplified in the fiction of Grace Paley. Paley, born in the Bronx in 1922 to parents who came from Ukraine, would know the rhythms and intonations of Yezierska's stories from her own immigrant family, who were contemporaries of Yezierska. 2 In essence, Yezierska's work is about multiple marginalities for which she used the Yiddish-English dialect to enhance her depiction of her characters' ghetto life. Her voice contains a vibrant, heightened, high-pitched emotionalism and euphoria, candor and openness which is intensely affirmative even as her female narrators battle against poverty and Jewish-American immigrant patriarchy. In part, this narrative voice owes much to the verbal style of ghetto women's speech, of which Sally Ann Drucker writes, "Women's verbal styles differed from men's in the activities of quarreling, marketing, and worrying"1. Drucker also comments on how Yezierska "uses the emotional verbal style of Yiddish-speaking or dialect-speaking ghetto women in constructing her stories. The stories too, are expressive, tearful, joyous, and voluble. They have extremes and quick mood changes." (Drucker 110). This is because "Yiddish, considered a women's language for many centuries, developed an early literature primarily for women." It is this women's tradition Yezierska draws upon, as she uses the folk or oral tradition's devices of ghetto storyteller. In particular, she utilizes illiterate shtetl women's story- telling, deprecatingly called bobe-mayses or grandmother's tales. 3 Anzia Yezierska, born in Poland around 1880 in a town along the Vistula River, emigrated as a child to the United States with her family. Brought up on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, she worked in garment shops and factories, and studied English in Journal of the Short Story in English, 32 | Spring 1999 Immigrant Jewish identity and the female voice: Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley 2 night school. Her first published story, "Fat of the Land," brought her recognition at age thirty-nine and in subsequent stories she continued to depict the immigrant Jewish experience, especially the Russian-Jewish, women's experience, and working class struggle. 4 Thomas J. Ferraro points out of Yezierska that, "In portraying her 'own people' her duty was to update the project of realism by investigating the reciprocal reshaping between Eastern European folk Judaism and the structures of opportunity in twentiethcentury America." (Ferraro 532) By the time Grace Paley starts writing, that project of assimilation has been largely achieved and Paley's women characters, as daughters of the generation Yezierska wrote about, are freer than Yezierska's were. Nevertheless, oppression and injustice remain in America. Through a comparison of Yezierska's voice with Paley's, I want to show how both writers' optimism and belief in change allows them to overcome their otherness as Jews and women and to achive American success. At the same time, they never forget their origins. To use Julia Kristeva's term, their voices embody jouissance in their triumph over what Paley has called "the dark lives of women." (Hulley 27). 5 I begin with a discussion of the elements of Yezierska's immigrant female voice in her short stories. Then, through an analysis of Paley's stories, I will show how Paley's style evokes Yezierska's technique. 6 As Alice Kessler-Harris observes, "Yezierska's technique and subject grew out of the literary realism which was then the mode."(Kessler-Harris vi) Like the American realist writers, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Stephen Crane, Yezierska recreated the reality of social conditions in the early 1900's, in her case, the Jewish ghetto. Yet her stories do not, in my view, read like the conventional realism of her time. For one thing, Yezierska eschews form; there is little plot structure in her stories. Instead she relies on the excitement and urgency of her speaker's voice to convey the tenement lives her characters lead. Vivian Gornick describes this voice as "the slightly hallucinated cry of Yezierska's immigrant anguish." (Gornick ix) It as if the speaker cannot stop herself from talking, the partly anguished and partly joyful language spilling almost uncontrollaby onto the page.This highly charged intense mode of narration, reflects, I believe, the speaker's submission to language itself, a language which is an amalgamation of the New World and the Old. She creates an immigrant language with its memories of the mother tongue, Yiddish, and a desire to be born anew as an English speaking American. Thus the subject of Yezierska's fiction, described by Kessler-Harris as hunger and Gornick as loss, is contained in the speaker's narration. 7 To these descriptions of her subject matter I would add the element of orality, evidenced in the titles of her work, for example, Hungry Hearts and The Breadgivers. Freud, in his essay on negation, links negation to the process through which the child takes in and ejects the objects of its world: Expressed in the language of the oldest-the oral-instinctual impulses, the judgement is: 'I would like to eat this,' or I would like to spit this out'. (Freud 237) 8 Using Freud's formulation, I would suggest that Yezierska takes the dismal, povery- stricken lonely conditions of her immigrant existence in, and then, in language, spits it out. Furthermore, the child-like excitation of her narration expresses her learning to speak a new tongue, as a child first learns to speak. Yezierska's writing is voraciously oral in its creation of a new form, Yiddish-American speech, and its content, hunger. Journal of the Short Story in English, 32 | Spring 1999 Immigrant Jewish identity and the female voice: Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley 3 9 In her book Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva writes: Learning to speak is like trying to make one's own an oral 'object' which slips away , and whose necessarily deformed hallucination threatens us from the outside. (Kristeva 4) 10 For Kristeva, writing is anti-phobic, which can be seen in Yezierska's obsessional voice which hungers, demands and exhausts. Her narrators' hunger for more than bread; they hunger for love. 11 Yezierska has said of her own work, "My one story is hunger. Hunger driven by loneliness." (CS 136) Consider, for example, the excessiveness of the quintessential Yezierska story "The Miracle" from Hungry Hearts. Starting in the old country and ending in the new, it begins: Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams. With nothing but my longing for love, I burned my way through stone walls till I got to America. And what happened to me when I became an American is more than I can picture before my eyes, even in a dream. (CS 50) 12 But perhaps the most important hunger of all in Yezierska's narrators is the hunger "to make from myself a person." (CS115) This is the immigrant dream of Yezierska's female speakers, a dream that can be fulfilled through education in America. Her story "How I Found America" describes the Polish-Jewish villagers fear of the Cossack who forbids any gathering to study. But "In America you can say what you feel-you can voice your thoughts in the open streets without fear of a Cossack." (CS 132) The narrator hears the people saying on the journey to America in steerage, "Learning flows free." She thinks: The words painted pictures in my mind. I saw before me free schools, free colleges, free libraries, where I could learn and learn and keep on learning. (CS 113) 13 But she is disappointed when the only free learning offered to her is at a trade school where the teacher, Mrs. Olney, tells her she needs to study something useful. "Did I come to America for a living?" she asks Mrs Olney and explains: I came to give out all the fine things that was choked in me in Russia. I came to help America make the new world...They said in America I could open up my heart and fly free in the air-to sing-to dance-to live-to love. (CS 121) 14 In this story as in others, the speaker is ultimately disappointed and overcome by the poverty, lack of opportunity, sweatshop condtions and misunderstanding of immigrants that she finds in America. Education and learning become the dream she pursues to "become a person" and America the "mantra" she repeats over and over, her answer to her hungers which can never be assuaged.